Tag: pedagogy

  • How Do Students Evaluate Class Activities?

    I got a new GoPro so what better way to break it in than to walk and talk through something on my mind about teaching. I think what explains the lack of student motivation best is that they have only one measure to evaluate things in this world: entertainment. Is it entertaining? If not, they…

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  • Free to Teach

    Is asking someone to consider the broader impact of supporting a policy out of place? Disrespectful? Is it hostile? Is it inconsiderate? The Governor of Louisiana thinks so. An LSU Law professor asked students that if they felt comfortable voting for Donald Trump because of his policy agenda, they should consider how that makes people…

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  • Responding to the Recent U.S. Election

    The responses have been poor, to understate it. I see little action plan and a lot of reaction to something that was apparently “hard to imagine” – most of the population voting against foreigners and for America first. I’m not sure who finds that hard to imagine, but it shouldn’t be rhetoricians. But here we…

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  • Writing Studies

    Writing studies seems so much more serious than anything going on in speech communication rhetoric to me these days. I think what’s most attractive is the focus on the idea of pedagogy. This requires the assumption that people can change if we give them opportunity to do so, and that opportunity exists in the carefully…

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  • Bad Teacher

    I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why. Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t…

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  • I Taught a Terrible Class Today

    I thought the class would be great. Why was it so bad? First of all, what’s a bad class? Definitions abound! I would say for me a bad class means: I should have prepared differently. I should have spent more time thinking about the material, which was very familiar to me. The death of good…

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  • Should Students Speak about Controversy in the Public Speaking Class?

    I was asked by the people at Power of Public Speaking if I would like to be a guest host on their POPs Community podcast. In thinking about what to talk about for 45 minutes or so, I thought a great topic would be why we are obligated to allow students to speak about very…

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  • A Year of Online Debating – Reflections and Lessons Learned – New Podcast Episode

    https://anchor.fm/inthebin/episodes/Lessons-Learned-from-Taking-Intercollegiate-Debate-Online-etsa4b In this new episode of In the Bin, I chat with Will Silberman who has tabbed a ton of British Parliamentary format debate tournaments here in the United States. We talk about the past 13 months of online debate, what questions about debate it raises, what mistakes were made, and what benefits came out…

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  • The Return of the Oral Exam to American Universities

    I’ve been doing some reading into the long tradition of the oral exam, something we’ve given up on in the United States. In many other countries the oral exam isn’t just normal, it’s expected. Some countries even require an oral exam to graduate from university. The standard format is a series of questions that are…

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  • Who Gets to Determine the Available Arguments on an Issue?

    The ancient question of what topics are appropriate for students to speak about, debate about, or write about is evergreen. I think about this at the end and start of every teaching term. I see several approaches to this question that are well-warranted. It doesn’t mean that I agree with any of them though! The…

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